If I had my way, I'd ban the word, 'empowerment', in Nigeria. Like everything they touch, Nigerian politicians have ruined it. It is now effectively part of the country's vast architecture of corruption & dehumanization of the masses.
You loot public funds with impunity. You impoverish the people to near extinction. You pauperize and diseducate them till they lose the cognitive capacity to recognize human dignity. Where poverty & hunger reside, human dignity is fanciful theory.
You take small change from their money that you have stolen. You buy wheelbarrows, sewing machines, ero alota, shoe shining equipment, name some useless project after yourself & cut the ribbon of empowerment. Have you ever empowered your children with these stuff?
The sophisticated ones will buy buses with looted change, name the project after themselves & declare empowerment. You get away with such galling impunity because u had taken the precaution to pauperize the people. Hunger and reasoning are not friends.
In their condition of indignity, poverty, & hunger, they are left only with an impulsive recourse to gratitude. They are grateful to you, their hero and messiah, for moving in to save the day with a project named after yourself and with their own money. U have empowered them.
The people's dignity is not d only casualty. Accountability also suffers. How much did Gbaja buy his buses? More appropriately, how much did the people buy the buses named for Gbaja? A Nigerian politician will normally still loot from empowerment via over-invoicing.